The real problem with telling young writers to fan out across genres and forms is that it doesn’t help them find a voice. If anything, it’s antivoice. Learning the craft of writing isn’t about hopping texts like hyperlinks. It’s about devotion and obsession. It’s about lingering too long in some beloved book’s language, about steeping yourself in someone else’s style until your consciousness changes colour. It’s Tolkien phases and Plath crushes. It’s going embarrassingly, un...

My professors’ generation could respond to silliness like creationism with head-scratching bemusement. My students cannot afford that luxury. Instead they must become fierce champions of science in the marketplace of ideas.
During my undergraduate studies I was shocked at the low opinion some of my professors had of the astronomer Carl Sagan. For me his efforts to popularize science were an inspiration, but for them such “outreach” was a diversion. That view makes no sense today.
The ...

When we are engaged in what we are
doing, all sorts of things happen. We
persist longer at difficult problems—and
become more likely to solve them. We
experience something that psychologist
Tory Higgins refers to as flow, a presence
of mind that not only allows us to extract
more from whatever it is we are doing but
also makes us feel better and happier: we
derive actual, measurable hedonic value
from the strength of our active
involvement in and attention to an activity,
even if the activi...

My original decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery which has never ceased to fill me with enthusiasm since my early youth—the comprehension of the far from obvious fact that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the laws governing the sequences of the impressions we receive from the world about us; that, therefore, pure reasoning can enable man to gain an insight into the mechanism of the latter. In this connection, it is of paramount importance that t...

It seems that most people, even intelligent and well-informed people, are confused about the difference between the Internet and the Web. No one has expressed this misunderstanding more clearly than Tom Wolfe in Hooking Up:
I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mai...

Hillis notes that people equate the www with the internet, failing to realize they are actually very different things, with www being just one thing out of many running on the internet. He compares it to people equating electricity with electric lights, and failing to realize all the other applications the invention makes possible.

You see the problem fo obtaining facts from experience--it sounds very, very simple. You just try it and see. But man is a weak character and it turns out to be much more difficult than you think to just try it and see. For instance, you take education. Some guy comes along and he sees the way people teach mathematics. And he says, "I have a better idea. I'll make a toy computer and teach them with it." So he tries it with a group of chidlren, he hasn't got a lot of children, maybe somebody g...

Because one experimenter gets positive results from teaching children with computers, it does not follow that everyone should use them, the experimenter may have had enthusiasm for their use, which would skew the results.

...governments and communities have to establish and enforce strong antitrust laws--which is basically fighting any group that gets too large and usurps power. Antitrust fosters decentralization of power, whether from government or business hands. Right now, antitrust authorities are already cooperating across borders in a number of cases, including worldwide companies such as Microsoft and Beoing. But it's hard for any establishment--including governments-to enforce antitrust with enthusiasm...